Anyone can build a website now. The hard part is keeping it working.
WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, the new AI website builders: putting a smart-looking site online has never been easier. The part none of them handle is the slow drift afterwards, when an update or an edit quietly breaks something and the site still looks perfect from the front.
I had a proper look under the bonnet of a batch of local business sites recently. Every one of them looked the part. Between them, this is what I actually found:
- A "call us" button ringing the wrong number.
- No easy way to phone the business at all on a mobile.
- Good, genuine customer questions on the page that no search engine or AI assistant could read.
- Nothing telling Google the address, the opening hours or the area covered.
- Not one named person or qualification anywhere on the site.
- Heavy images slowing everything down, and out-of-date code underneath.
None of that shows if you just glance at the site. It renders, it looks smart, the homepage loads. Which is exactly why these faults sit there for years, quietly costing enquiries, with nobody the wiser.
Why the builder is not the problem, and the update is
A site is not a finished object. It is software, and software drifts. On WordPress a plugin or theme update is the usual culprit: it ships a change, and a week later your structured data is gone or your contact form has stopped sending, with nothing on screen to announce it. On Wix, Squarespace and the AI builders it tends to be a well-meaning edit or a template change that drops a phone link or an alt text. Same result either way. The thing that was working stops working, silently.
The one that still bothers me. A shop I know ran a plugin update, and it quietly left some private files exposed to the public that should never have been reachable at all, for months. Nothing on the visible website changed, so nobody thought to look. That is the shape of the problem: the damage is real, and it is invisible from the front door.
The honest fix is not "build it better", it is "watch it after"
You can build a site properly and it can still break next month. So the useful question is not how to make it perfect on day one, it is how to find out the day it changes. That is the entire reason Site Monitor exists. It re-checks your page every week, watches that the site is up every day, and emails you the day something that was working stops: what broke, what it is costing you, and how to put it right. The rest of the time it says nothing, which is the point.
It works the same on any builder, because it reads your live pages the way a visitor does. WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, Webflow, an AI builder: it makes no difference to the check.
Worth checking your own site while you are here. Tap your call button and see where it actually rings. Or run the free check and see everything at once.
Run the free checkWant the full write-up of the audit, with the numbers behind it? Read the BAV Tech case study.